GUELPH, ONT. • The rain on the paths behind the University of Guelph isn’t letting up, but neither are the runners. It’s Monday night, cold and mucky, and I’m with 40 runners, aged 18-32, who represent some of Canada’s best hopes for the 2012 Olympic games.

“This is arguably the strongest group of Canadian distance runners in history,” says Dave Scott-Thomas, 46, coach of the school’s running team and head of one of Canada’s two National Endurance Centres tasked with training the next batch of Olympians.

His philosophy on running is as valid for getting to London as it is for getting around your own block. Run as much as you can, but also listen to your body. In other words, push yourself until you feel yourself pushing back.

“I was a middle-of-the-pack runner after university and didn’t make the college team,” says Reid Coolsaet, one of Canada’s top three men’s distance runners. When he first came to Guelph from Hamilton, Coolsaet was also a competitive skier. But he upped his mileage without risking injury, and after 13 years of training, he now hopes to compete for a medal in the marathon at the 2012 Olympics.

Running with Coolsaet — who’s out front of the pack for the six 15-second dashes and the following three sets of four-minute sprints and then only with a sole runner on a final 10K jog — it’s easy to see what makes someone great. Coolsaet has spent all of his best running years under Scott-Thomas’s guidance. His coach doesn’t tell his runners exactly how far or how fast they should go. He devises a program, then encourages his athletes to stray from it in accordance to what they believe their bodies need.

“These guys know their own kinetics,” says Scott-Thomas, who, in addition to training the male and female University of Guelph runners, also coaches seven “card” athletes, semi-pro sports stars who subsist on a monthly government grant.

One of the runners, Eric Gillis, ran for Canada at the 2008 games in Beijing. He believes that the Endurance Centre is helpful because it allows the runners to form their own community. In Guelph, many of the runners live together. And so, in addition to pushing themselves, they also push one another. But watching Gillis run through fat drops of rain, it hardly looks like he needs anyone to push him.

“I’m thinking to myself, concentrate,” says Gillis, a 31-year-old new father who has legs thinner than most people’s wrists. Gillis and Coolsaet are something of an inspiration to Scott-Thomas’s other runners. Everyone here wants to someday set records and compete for their country; these men set both the pace — and the possibilities — for the group.

“Reid is our elder statesman,” says the coach, who watches the practice from the confines of his truck. The group trains together three times a week, and it’s the perfect balance of running alone and as part of a community, and nothing is being done on an artificial timetable.

After practice, the group reunites in a pair of old silver cold tubs, big vats of ice water that help ease inflammation in muscles and joints. Here, the gang trades nutrition tips (props for beet juice) and information on upcoming races (there’s talk of Coolsaet winning the half-marathon in two weeks in Montreal), but the real medicinal property may be in hanging out as a team.

“There’s no big secret lab that we have here, where we plug everyone in and make them run hard,” says Scott-Thomas. “We started out just as a humble little team that works hard. And from that came all this success.”

Keep up with Ben Kaplan by following him on Twitter: @NPrunning. He’ll be racing a reader soon, and it could be you! Send an email to running@nationalpost.com and you could win a pair of new sneakers.

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